Still Lots of 'Guesswork' After Facebook's Account Purge
*By Alex Heath*
Questions still linger over who was behind the coordinated misinformation campaign on Facebook ahead of the U.S. midterm elections.
“Facebook does not want to make an attribution yet,” Kevin Roose of The New York Times told Cheddar on Wednesday. “They have not definitively said this is Russia or this isn’t Russia.”
On Tuesday, Facebook disclosed that it had removed 32 accounts and pages that were involved in “coordinated inauthentic behavior.” The accounts organized real-world events around hot-button issues, like a sequel to last year’s deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. One of the pages, called "Resisters,” created a Facebook event for a protest in Washington that was scheduled to take place next week.
“Facebook is clearly taking the threat of foreign-led disinformation campaigns very seriously,” Theresa Payton, former White House CIO under President George W. Bush, told Cheddar on Wednesday. “Russian operatives and other operatives around the globe that want to meddle in elections have been changing their tactics to learn how to hide in plain site. This is just a drill, what’s going on going into the midterm elections.”
Facebook says that it’s in the early stage of investigating who is behind the coordinated effort. The social network recently began notifying members of the Justice Department and says it has been working with the FBI to investigate the activity.
Meanwhile, Facebook continues to deal with the fallout of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which exposed the data of millions of Facebook users. The company said on Tuesday that it had cut off access to “hundreds of thousands of inactive apps that have not submitted for our app review process.”
For more on this story, [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/facebook-still-unsure-whos-behind-latest-political-influence-campaign).
Amid a string of recalls for their electric cars, Tesla is also facing a lawsuit over workplace discrimination. The electric automaker is being accused by California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing of a pattern of racial discrimination against Black workers. Caleb Silver, Editor-in-Chief at Investopedia, joined Cheddar News to discuss the numerous technical and safety issues that led to the recalls and the allegations of systemic racist abuse at its Fremont plant. "Tesla disputes these claims, but still you can’t avoid the pattern," he said.
The Super Bowl is only a few days away, and the game is currently tracking to be the most expensive one ever.
Gametime, a website and app for last-minute tickets, says the average ticket price for the NFL's championship game is $9,502.50, with the most expensive seats costing nearly $38,000. That's a far cry away from the average ticket price of the first-ever Super Bowl in 1967, which was only $12. The average ticket price increased by more than $8,000 in just the past decade. Matt Rados, Senior Operations Manager at Gametime, joins Cheddar News' Closing Bell to discuss.
Earlier this week, digital investment advisor Betterment announced that it has hired Makara, a company known for its management of cryptocurrency portfolios. Sarah Levy, CEO of Betterment, joins Cheddar News' Closing Bell, where she explains why crypto represents such a promising long-term play and how her company stands to benefit from this latest move.
At-home medical labs company Getlabs raised $20 million in a Series A round, led by Emerson Collective and the Minderoo Foundation. Getlabs aims to be the boots-on-the-ground partner to telehealth. The company says more than 70% of medical decisions still require collecting diagnostic tests in person, and that it fills that void by delivering health care directly to their patients' homes. Founder & CEO of Getlabs Kyle Michelson joined Cheddar News' Closing Bell to discuss.
The White House laid out plans for a $5 billion investment into a national network of charging stations to ease EV driving anxiety. Bruce Brimacombe, CEO of EV infrastructure GOe3 joined Cheddar News to discuss how much needs to be done for drivers to get over the fear of running out of energy. "People need to be able to do what they're doing now," he said. "But that is the way that if you're going to buy an electric car, you got to feel like you're not changing your world." Brimacombe noted that building out the infrastructure between cities was GOe3's own focus.
